Guest Blogger: Oryx and Crake/The Year of The Floor - 5/5

Hi guys! Today's post is another guest post written by the lovely Catie, who's kindly reviewed two Margaret Atwood novels for us. You can follow Catie on Tumblr here and on Twitter here, so be sure to check her out if you enjoyed this review :) 

Oryx and Crake/The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

5/5 stars

In a sea of Hunger-Games spinoffs, I’d got a bit tired of the post-apocalyptic/dystopian genre, everything seemed very samey, and there were far, far too many love triangles. But when in doubt, Atwood is always the answer. 

Although The Year of the Flood is technically a sequel to Oryx and Crake, the two run concurrently, focusing on different characters following a mass extinction/apocalypse. I read Year of the Flood first, as it was lent to me, and I think you can read either first without too many problems - though if they’re both available to you, it’s probably best to start with Oryx and Crake, as that’s the book that actually explains why 99.9% of humans on Earth are dead. 

In both novels, we’re presented with a world that is simultaneously very different, and almost exactly like our own, in line with Atwood’s brand of speculative fiction. Where The Handmaid’s Tale takes reproduction to extremes, this world deals with genetic engineering and big-pharma (amongst other things). Those working in the industry are housed in secure compounds, with the “lower-classes” living in slum-like conditions, with no access to “real” food, amongst a number of religious cults, including “God’s Gardeners”, who come to prominence in The Year of the Flood. 

If you’ve never read anything by Margaret Atwood before, you may not be familiar with her style of jumping between timelines, which can be confusing to a firsttime reader. The technique really adds to these novels, gradually fleshing out the “how” and “why” in a way that feels very natural, allowing the reader to slowly bring together a number of threads of story to understand what has happened.

If you, like I had been, are getting sick of the same old cookie-cutter dystopian novels, I highly recommend reading this sequence of novels (the third, MaddAddam, came out last summer). Margaret Atwood does the best speculative fiction I’ve ever read, and you’ll be mulling over the messages in her writing for a long time after reading. 

One final note: her publishers seem to love changing the covers for the MaddAddam sequence. If you’re buying them second-hand, you might need to look around a bit in order to find a matching set (a quick check on Amazon shows about 7 different paperback covers just for O&C)